Here is Aristarchus Jones’s famous speech as he surveyed his new home: “A new world! Now I know how the Pilgrim Fathers felt, but unlike the Pilgrims, we left the old world and the old beliefs behind. Free at last! Free at last! No thanks to God, free at last! No irate God, no irate Jews, no irate Christians, no irate Moslems, only liberated loving selves. Now we shall show the Cosmos how to live in peace and freedom. My friends, let us begin by learning to know ourselves, for only by knowing our interior gods and demons can we exorcise them. Our first group session in self-knowledge will be held tomorrow morning. Now let’s get to work.”
Years pass. Twenty pregnancies occur, and seventeen live normal births. Earth plants, fish, and seals flourish. A peaceful agricultural-fishing society is formed. The colony is operated on the principles of Skinner’s Walden II modified by Jungian self-analysis, with suitable rewards for friendly social behavior and punishment, even exile, for aggressive, jealous, hostile, solitary, mystical, or other antisocial behavior. Daily dewalis (from the Hindu) are held in a kind of kiva where a dried lichen remarkably like the earth’s fruticose Rocellae is smoked, inducing a mild euphoria. Larger festivals with dancing and revelry are scheduled for the solstices and equinoxes of the Jovian year.
The Captain, now a sixty-five-year-old man, sits against a rock outside his cave, taking the mild summer sun. The green sky is half filled by the huge northern hemisphere of Jupiter.
He is reading a tattered copy of Henry IV. A laser recorder plays for perhaps the seven hundredth time Mozart’s fourteenth string quartet. Two young women, Candace and Rima, attend him, each lither and more lovely than Kimberly and Tiffany in their prime. One brings him kelp wine. The other anoints him with seal oil. Dr. Jane Smith, fifty-six, sulks in her cave, knowing quite well she would not be allowed to sulk outside.
Candace refills his glass and, giving him a backward glance, takes a step toward her cave. “Could we? That is to say, when?” she asks and adds: “We have an hour before group.”
“Oh, very well.” He rises stiffly, closing the book on Mistress Quickly and Prince Hal but picking up the Mozart. Rima’s fingers tighten angrily on his trapezius muscle. He winces. “But not without Rima,” he tells Candace.
Group is a daily exercise, in assemblages of ten, of self-criticism and honest appraisal of others. The only rule is honesty, absolute honesty. No more lies, no more self-deception, no more secrecy, no more guilt, no more shame. From Aristarchus’s own Little Green Book, the aphorism: “The new race will spring from the corpse of the old guilt.”
The Captain sighs. He alone of the colonists of the new Ionia is somewhat ironical. Getting rid of guilt is one thing. But he doesn’t look forward to the mea culpas and denunciations of the group. It reminds him too much of an AA meeting.
He takes another swig of kelp wine and another look at Candace’s behind. Some things don’t change.
“Very well,” he says again, taking each girl by the hand, the recorder under his arm still playing Mozart.
The three go inside his cave, which is filled with the orange light of Jupiter like a Halloween pumpkin.
(2) You’re the Captain.
You choose to go to Tennessee with Abbot Leibowitz. The colony settles in a pleasant mountain valley. You also sleep in a cave, Lost Cove cave, to reduce exposure to radiation, which is still considerable. Sperm counts vary.
Yet the children seem happy and grow strong. Even the misbegotten do well, ramble up and down mountainsides where in fact they are not much different from the local inbred covites.
You grow wild maize, collards, and trap rabbits, wild pigs, and quail, eat grits and sausage and side meat. Every day you watch ironically yet not without affection as the old abbot and his two black priests, black faces and black robes, the blackest blacks in the South, sing the Divine Office in a quavering chant which sounds more Jewish than Latin, and celebrate Mass with corn bread and scuppernong wine, raise a golden chalice, the abbot’s only souvenir of Utah. The altar is a slab of limestone, as rough as Stonehenge, fallen across the mouth of the cave, which had no doubt served as a table for the survivors of the last war.
Years pass. The Captain, now sixty-five, sits outside the entrance of Lost Cove cave, where Confederates holed up and made gunpowder some six hundred years earlier.
It is October. The sourwood and sassafras are turning, the leaves speckled in scarlet.
The colony has grown to some two hundred souls, both from successful pregnancies — Dr. Jane had been delivered of two more offspring, two boys, Robert E. Lee Schuyler and John Wesley Schuyler — and from an admixture of locals, strays, wanderers, refugees from the old Northeast. Mostly they are Southerners, white Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, and blacks, with a sprinkling of Hispanics, Jews, and Northern ethnics.
The Captain has formed the habit of sitting on the hillside above the cave, a warm place fragrant with rabbit tobacco and scuppemong and the pine-winey light. It is a favorite meeting place on Sunday mornings of the unbelievers — non-churchgoers and dissidents of one sort and another — while the tiny congregations of Catholics and Protestants hold services. There is even talk of a temple, but the five Jews, one orthodox, one reformed, one conservative, one humanist, and one Yemenite Israeli, cannot get together.
The Captain, two covites (mountain men still wearing bib overalls in the old style), two ex-Atlantans (middle-management types from high-tech industries), three fem-libbers (including Kimberly) who are sick and tired of both the male-dominated space age and the male-dominated clergy, a few twenty-sixth-century hippies, vagabonds from God knows where — gather companionably while the old abbot celebrates Mass below with his two young servers. They, the servers, are white, none other than Siddhartha and Carl Jung, each of whom has already received minor orders. The two black monks are gone. Amos died. Andy discovered his roots in nearby Alabama, resigned his priesthood, and joined the Shiloh Baptist church, a tiny black Baptist community.
“Why don’t you come to Mass?” asked Dr. Jane Smith.
“My cathedral is the blue sky. My communion is with my good friends,” replied the Captain.
“Bull,” said Dr. Jane Smith.
One of the covites, Jason McBee, produces a fruit jar of corn whiskey, by no means the white-lightning of the old bootleggers, but a mellow-gold confection, aged in the wood, smooth as honey, and fiery as the October sun. The Captain takes a long pull.
“Ah,” he says.
The “heathen,” as they call themselves, begin their usual good-natured bickering mostly about political and agricultural subjects — whether to start a corn co-op, what to do about a rumored Celtic enclave across the old Carolina line, a growing community with a reputation for violence and snake-handling.
Indeed, one of the covites, the stranger with Jason McBee, has come from Carolina as a kind of emissary. He allows that he wishes to shake their hands in friendship. He does. They drink. The mountain men hunker down. The others sit down. The Carolinian has come to propose a political alliance.
An alliance of whom against whom? the Captain wants to know.
Of us against them.
Who’s us?
I’m talking about us rat cheer.
You mean us white folks?
You got it.